Tuesday, June 21 at dawn, the Mossos d’Esquadra Corps kicked down the door of the house of an anarchist comrade of Barcelona, where he lived with his companion and other housemates. All were awakened by guns pointed on them and were handcuffed for hours while police raided and devastated the home, located in the neighbourhood del Eixample. Eventually, the comrade was arrested and transferred to Madrid, where the National Court ordered his detention on the basis of a European arrest warrant issued by the prosecutor of Aachen, accusing him of having participated in the expropriation of a branch of Pax Bank that took place in November 2014.

It is for this same action that the comrade arrested on April 13 in Carmel is also in prison. In this case, however, the police decided not to use the staging and media spectacle it had used during the April operation, not issuing any press release and not notifying the media of the operation.

According to what we have been able to find out, the arrest warrant is based on the supposed coincidence between a trace of genetic material found in the Pax Bank in Aachen and a DNA sample that Mossos had taken from the comrade, simulating a BAC control for alcohol. During this false control, the police got him to blow into a breathalyzer and kept the plastic tip to extract the genetic profile of the comrade from the remaining saliva.

After a relatively brief imprisonment in the Madrid Soto de Real prison, the comrade was transferred to the prison of Aachen – in the Land of North Rhine – Westphalia (in West Germany) – where he is in conditions similar to those of the comrade arrested in April: one hour’s air a day, held in the remand building, only a few hours visit a month, unable to call those close to him and control of all communications. The visiting format is particularly degrading; visits take place in the presence of two police officers from the unit conducting the investigation and an interpreter who translates the conversation simultaneously.

However, this is not the first time that the comrade has faced the challenges of punishment and the prison institution. His current detention adds itself to a previous sentence of over 10 years served in Portugal – where he is from -, during which he was noted for his denunciation of abuse and violation of prisoners’ rights, for participating in hunger strikes, organizing with other prisoners to improve their living conditions, urging them to abandon the drugs with which the institution makes the enclosed population submit and personally creating a large libertarian library to promote awareness and the political formation of the prisoners, a continuation of the work as bookseller that he had developed before entering prison. His combative attitude and his solidarity put him in the firing line of the prison administration and finally he was judged as one of the 25 accused in the well known mutiny of Caixas*. Once outside, the comrade moved to Barcelona, where he has often been seen participating in meetings, street demonstrations and activities of the libertarian movement.

Today, along with the comrade arrested in April, he faces the upcoming trial where he will be judged for his alleged involvement in the November 2014 bank expropriation.

We point out that with him three people are already implicated in what the German police describe as a “series of robberies” that took place in Aachen between 2012 and 2014, counting the Dutch comrade who is on provisional release pending trial in September. There it will be decided whether she should be re-extradited to Germany, where she has already served several months of preventive prison, accused of having carried out an expropriation in 2013.

We send all our strength and our solidarity, our respect and our support to who is being prosecuted in the name of the capitalist order and its foundations: exploitation between equals and the submission of the whole of life, social relations and territories to the blind logic of profit, the conversion of money into more money, and the enrichment of some on the impoverishment of all the others.

Freedom for the persons accused of expropriating banks in Germany! Freedom for all persons in struggle incarcerated and accused!

(*) In this mutiny, which occurred in March 1996, the growing wave of struggles by prisoners in the Portuguese prisons throughout the 90s reached a climax, giving rise to a generalised movement of protest in the Caixas penitentiary, one of the most overcrowded in Portugal where the non-respect of rights that continued after the overthrow of the dictatorship was the most obvious. The protest movement that demanded as a minimum the application of these constitutional rights, was stifled by savage beatings against the 180 hungerstrikers who participated in the mobilization.

In the course of awaiting the processes of several anarchists that are accused of having robbed banks in Aachen in 2013 and 2014, the prosecution office of Aachen, Germany, and their obedient voice, the media, use every chance available to advance their investigation. Whether it is on a juridical or a more subtle mediatic level, all these expressions are different tentacles of the same mechanism of repression. As usual the mainstream media are eager to get a “good” story by all means necessary, pervertedly scrutinizing people’s lives regardless of any ethics. They therefore do not hesitate in aiding the prosecution in spreading their fantastical tales. We have read these without much surprise – this is what journalists do after all –, have watched the hysterical spectacle that is being created around the implicated. Not being surprised however does not mean that we do not feel the need to clarify a few things that may have become blurred in the midst of this incessant stream of written and televised vomit.

After having ejaculated several articles in which the accused were portrayed according to the image the prosecution is trying to spread, the media has now decided it is time to create their own story. A rumour came to us through the grapevine that a certain Dutch journalist has posted a request on Indymedia asking for information concerning one of the accused. Apparently not satisfied with the image dictated by the prosecution, he searches for “people in the squatting movement of Amsterdam who could tell me something about X”, after which he states that whoever decides to snitch need not worry, as he “will not tell anyone these conversations have taken place.” Needless to say, we are disgusted by this. What should be said is that until this day no statement has been made by the accused towards neither the media nor the cops, and therefore – excuse us for pointing out the obvious – no statement should be made by anyone else either.

Let it be clear that the media and the police are two sides of the same coin, and work closely together in a most refined manner: the media hunts for a story, the prosecution throws out a few assumptions and character sketches, the media publishes these and thus transforms it into “truth”, et voilà, the prosecution is able to reproduce this “truth” and use the mediatic hunt against the implicated. For if the media say so, it must be true. For if the media states these are dangerous criminals on the run, they must be – etcetera ad nauseam. All these intimidation efforts only aim to reinforce the State’s accusations and bring the accused in the dock already convicted by a machine of lies, slander and State propaganda. These tactics are not limited to this case; they have endlessly reproduced themselves throughout history. The media are not only in service of repression, they too are at the very core of repression.

The collaboration between State and media has always been a recipe for misleading information, witch hunts and repression. The media play an important role in manipulating the public opinion, it assures the hegemony of support for the State, even when it is forced to drop the mask of “justice” and openly show its repressive mechanisms. The media excuses repression against everything or anyone that deviates from the norm, against those who do not function in a manner that is productive for or supportive of State and capital. Even, or perhaps especially in a democratic regime such as the one we live under, the media are intertwined with State propaganda; both offer us the illusion we have the choice to form an opinion, decide by whom we want to be oppressed. Yet these “choices” are always confined within the same rigid parameters of a totalitarian regime that does not allow any challenge to itself, to its logics, to its Power.

Democracy has refined the art of brainwashing, to the point of making media propaganda pass as coexistence of multiple opinions, as the transmission of unbiased information and “free” thinking. Its only aim however consists of maintaining the authority of the States and of capital. Of course democracy allows some slightly contradicting – but in fact complimentary – divergences of positions to exist, to create a self-reinforcing debate, but never a challenge to the existence of institutional authority itself. It creates a wilful participation based on the only claim that democracy is less worse than other totalitarian regimes, that we should count ourselves lucky to be living under a democratic regime.

However, every regime needs enemies in order to offer a solution for the problems they have created, to legitimize its repressive apparatus and ultimately legitimize itself. The search for and classification of enemies too is reinforced and exercised by the media. We have noted the silence and excuses of the media in the economic “crisis” and the troubles of the banks; we have also heard their sickening stories about “external enemies” rattling at the gates of Fortress Europe, accused of wanting to enjoy the fruits of western welfare – fruits that were won by centuries of pillaging by the same western countries. The media reinforce the depiction of people as mere numbers, reinforce the climate of fear in which western countries saturate themselves, and simultaneously show an ever increasing eagerness to praise new “security measures” supposed to keep out or lock up the unwanted, those who might cause the system to stagger.

Whether these unwanted denominate the thousands of people seeking a better life somewhere in the world or those who refuse to or cannot bow down to Power (or a combination of the two) is irrelevant. Murdering borders are being pulled up around its Fortress to keep out “refugees”, while inside the walls repression aims to silence and punish anyone who cannot be kept out or removed from the grounds. The media speak of external enemies, the State also seeks out its internal enemies. Obviously repression is not limited to anarchists, it does however often focus on those who decide to fight repression. For example, in The Hague several people were given an area ban because they dared to show solidarity and agitate in a neighbourhood in a time of control, of cameras, preventive arrests and searches. The ban concerns the Schilderswijk neighbourhood, where in the summer of 2015 riots took place several days in a row after cops had murdered someone. Anarchists were later accused of having incited the revolt. These days even questioning the system and calling out for struggle on a poster referring to the revolt is enough to be prosecuted for incitation.

Repressive blows however cannot be seen as single isolated events, do not exist in a vacuum. They form part of an aggressive multi-front campaign, which aims to achieve a further, distinct step in the devouring of freedom, in violently expressing the domination of the State. Whether it concerns justifying the militarization of streets, emergency measures, legitimizing building walls at borders, massacring people or pursuing its campaigns against rebels and revolutionaries, it certainly needs a voice that creates a reality and an atmosphere in which repression is possible, acceptable and hopefully unquestioned. These are the mechanisms of State propaganda, this is the purpose of the media. Media is an integral and essential part in authority guarding its control and dictating the dependence and approval it needs to rule. The millions of words and images that fill the screens and (toilet)papers are not an echo or reflection of reality, they form an integral part of the creation of that reality, of the imposition of the morals, rules and logics that permit the existence of the State.

When someone challenges this reality – the frame of authority itself –, when someone fights against it or simply refuses it, there is no mercy shown to the isolation or neutralization that by all means it unleashes against these individuals or groups. Not only through the sentences of the justice system, but also through the stigmatization of these individuals towards the rest of society, making sure they will carry their scarlet letter for the rest of their lives. The media aids the State in relying on public opinion to continue its work: judging, speculating and rendering as uncontagious as possible the ideas and practices that those incompatible with the system defend or are accused of. When the media portrays itself as a court room, it seeks out judges and prosecutors in the public. And this is where we need to be careful, where we need to consider our (perhaps subconscious) role in the continuation of these mechanisms, and ask ourselves how much we contribute to the speculation and creation of roles and a reality that only suits the narrative of domination.

Let’s not forget that repression can be fought in many areas. A court room and newspaper articles however are not among those, this is not the terrain of our struggles, methods and ideas. Let’s leave the speculation and distortion of reality to the experts – the State, cops, media, and their defenders –, let’s understand and intervene in reality on our own terms.

Helsinki/Finland: On 11th of August a small event in solidarity with the
anarchists accused of bank robberies in Aachen were held in a bookshop
in Helsinki. A short presentation about the case were followed by a
discussion about anarchist solidarity, solidarity which is based in the
way one sees ones own struggle in the struggle of others. Other topics
related to the case, such as police use of DNA-evidence, repressive
developments, avoiding the terms of guilty/innocent and ethics of
anarchist action, were also discussed. Posters were distributed as well
as printed letters from the accused comrades. The event was part of the
weeklong Musta Kallio (Black Kallio, Kallio being a neighbourhood in
Helsinki) anarchist festival.

This site:

for the spreading of information, echoes of solidarity, rage and reflexions about the case of three anarchists accused of bank robbery by the prosecution of Aachen, Germany

THE VERDICTS

on the 7th of June 2017 the court of Aachen sentenced one anarchist comrade to 7.5 years of prison, while the other one was acquitted for a bank robbery that took place in 2014.
in december 2016 an other anarchist comrade was acquitted of a bank robbery in Aachen that took place in 2013.